


When I go flying off the edge (you go flying off as well)

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Friendship, Flashbacks, Gen, Mentions of Past Torture, everyone has trauma and they're both starting to realise it, no one has good coping mechanisms but they're trying, pre-stream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 13:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17224730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Prompt: the first time Nott finds out about Caleb's fear of fire,ORAND the first time Caleb finds out about Nott's fear of water.





	When I go flying off the edge (you go flying off as well)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the song Something I Need by OneRepublic, which feels "Nott & Caleb as life partners"-adjacent to me.

“Caleb! Caleb, please, we have to go…” Nott tugged nervously at the sleeve of his coat, trying to exert a little pressure, but it was as though he didn’t feel it or hear her voice. She tried to still the nervous twitching of her ears and her hands as she peered past him, glancing off to where the sound of running feet and shouts of alarm and anger were filtering around the corner of the outhouse. The sounds were familiar to Nott, with the life she had lived, but there was an urgency to them now, and they were growing louder and closer alarmingly fast, enough to make Nott’s heart beat out a nervous rhythm in her chest.

She had been the one that had given them away; she had to be more careful, she knew. Caleb had warned her against trying to steal from the magistrate in broad daylight in the middle of the village square, but there had been the _itch_ , and she had _nearly_ gotten away with it too if not for the guards. One of them had rushed to protect her master, and one had run to raise the alarm.

And one had followed, when Caleb and Nott had tried to run for the edge of town.

She gritted her teeth, shaking her head so her ears flapped, as though to shake the very speculation away. This was her fault, Caleb had been defending her even as the guard – pierced with three of her crossbow bolts in the gaps in his armour - lunged for Nott with that fearsome-looking halberd that, she knew, would have run her through if Caleb had not stepped in between. And maybe the blade would even have hit Caleb himself if the blow had been able to land; as it was, Nott’s eyes had watered with the heat as a stream of fire had come from Caleb’s outstretched hand towards the guard, catching his tabard on fire immediately, heating up his armour so that he screamed as he burned within the heavy plate, fingers scrabbling at the leather straps to no avail.

He had still been burning as he had fallen, until the fire died down and left Caleb standing over the blackened, twisted corpse.

Which was where Caleb was standing still, a few minutes later, as what sounded like a mob of villagers came running from the main square. Caleb stood perfectly still, staring down at the smoking ruin of the guard’s body; he hadn’t even lowered his hand, as though it had been mere moments since he had done it. And when Nott peered around at him, she saw that his eyes were wide and glassy in the glow of the last dying embers of the fire and the bloody pink of the sunset. It scared her almost more than watching him burn a man alive, seeing him like that; she could see the white all around his eyes, and they were unfocused, staring as though at something that wasn’t there.

(Some of the people she had seen tortured – or helped to torture herself - had looked like that, she realised. Some of them, after they had been made to suffer for long enough, fell into worlds inside themselves to block out the pain, their eyes going empty and shadowed. After that, it usually meant they didn’t have long left.)

But at that moment, even as she felt a pang of concern and tenderness, she was still very conscious of the approaching pursuit, the jangling peals of an alarm bell from down the hill. She tugged harder at his sleeve. “Caleb!” She felt her voice rising, turning even more shrill with panic. If he didn’t run, she was fairly sure there was no way she could physically _make_ him. But if he didn’t move, then they would kill both of them, as likely as not. As it was, she was tugging nervously at Caleb’s arm, trying to physically pull him away, while desperately running through possibilities. It was a little hard to think, however, when all her mind seemed to provide her with was images of them being torn apart by an angry mob. And all the while, Caleb was still staring at the corpse, still smoking gently at his feet.

The noise was growing louder; now, Nott could see the flicker of torches, coming up the hill through the gap between the outbuildings. She bit her lip nervously behind her mask, cradling Caleb’s inert hand in hers. She tried to rub some soothing circles into the back of it, over the grimy bandages, but her fingers were trembling so badly she doubted she was doing much to help.

Although, with that thought came an idea, that was desperate but might just save them. For a moment, she dropped Caleb’s hand, pulled out her flask and took a swig, collecting herself.

“I’m sorry in advance, Caleb” she said, and as she did she picked up his hand again and, giving it a soft kiss across the knuckles. Then, she bit down on the ball of his thumb as hard as she could, sinking her teeth in until she drew blood.

The effect was immediate. Suddenly, Caleb’s attention snapped to her, his eyes for a moment darting and unfocused, a yelp of pain dying on his lips as he seemed to come back to himself. He raised his bleeding hand up beside the one he still held extended in gesture of casting, peering down at both palms – one smeared with ash, one bloody – open before him. The look in his eyes was still fearful, still half-empty, but there was a dawning realisation there as he looked down at Nott, then at the corpse, then at the glow of torches in the distance and the noise that was growing closer by the moment. Then back to Nott again.

She tugged on his sleeve, as the first of the villagers appeared around the bend in the road, wielding a pitchfork and screaming; _thieves! Murderers!_ Immediately, she was followed by another, and another, running up the hill towards the cluster of outbuildings.

Caleb took one last look at the smoking corpse, and took in a deep, deep, trembling breath.

Then, to her intense relief, he clasped Nott’s hand with a fierce, strong grip, and together they began to run.

They rounded the corner of the little cluster of farm buildings after a moment, but the ground grew tussocky here, by the edge of the yard. They jumped together over a little brook that ran along a hedgerow, and Nott nearly slipped in the dark, just managing to grasp two handfuls of long, damp grass to pull herself up. Beside her, she heard Caleb let out a sound at the effort of dragging himself up the bank towards the hedgerow. He turned back for a moment, and she caught sight of his eyes when he did, reflecting the fiery light of the setting sun behind her.

Those eyes were still wide, still the eyes of a hunter’s prey. But now, at least, they were filled with life again, no longer the fearful, shadowed emptiness she had seen as he stood over the charred remains of the man he had killed to save her.

A moment later, she caught his hand and he pulled her up, the two of them scrambling and pushing their way through the thorny hawthorn hedgerow. Thorns tore at Nott’s clothes and skin, but in that moment she barely noticed them; she could hear the jeers and shouts, and now there was also the yapping of hunting dogs. She swallowed thickly, fighting back tears from pure nervousness as she forced her way through the hedge, Caleb grabbing her hand from the other side to pull her through where a gnarled branch snagged her cloak. She came free after a moment, sprawling across him, but he was quick to lift her up and set her on her feet. His face was full of hard determination now, she saw; he looked absent in a different way than before, cold and unyielding in a way that she knew from experience that he slipped into whenever danger threatened.

Nevertheless, they clasped hands again briefly as they started to run through the field, feet catching in ploughed ridges and furrows so that they both stumbled several times in the fading light of sunset. Caleb’s breathing was beginning to rasp and wheeze, Nott noticed, and her own chest was starting to hurt too, her breaths coming sharp and fast. But, she knew, if they weren’t torn apart by the dogs then they could rest later.

“They’re gaining on us!” she heard herself whimper out, hoping Caleb would hear her; she could barely hear her own voice over the noise of the wind in her ears, the baying of the dogs and the cries of the angry mob.

“Nott, keep running!” she heard Caleb shout. When she cast a glance towards him, she saw that his hands were beginning to glow with flame once more, smoke trailing back as they ran. “I will hold them off!”

She nearly tripped, gulping in fear. “You can’t!” She thought of the way he had been just a few minutes – though it felt like hours – before, frozen and empty-eyed, trembling in place with the fire burning away to embers at his feet. “What if…” she let her voice trail off. “You can’t. We’ll both run together, or not at all.”

“Oh, do not worry” he growled, under his breath. “I am not planning on dying here.” Caleb turning around, taking a wild shot over his shoulder at their pursuers, the fire lighting up the darkening ground around them. It lit up Caleb’s face for a moment, twisted and agonised, but filled once more with that icy resolve, in counterpoint to the blistering heat. He took another shot, and another, and though neither of them looked back, on the second and third shots Nott heard a scream and then the pained whimpering of a frightened animal.

But for each firebolt Caleb sent back, Nott realised, the split second’s hesitation left him lagging a little further behind her. He was trailing at least thirty feet behind her now, and crossbow bolts were arcing over their heads. There was one hope, though; they had left the farmlands behind, now, and above she could see the black silhouettes of a little copse of trees against the purpling sky. That meant safety, surely, or at least cover. The grass and the undergrowth were growing taller already, as they reached the wilder land near the bases of the trees, felt the crunch of beech husks under her feet as she set foot under the cover of the branches. Beneath them, it was much, much darker, but that was good too; many of the villagers were human, and so in the dark, Nott had the advantage over both them and perhaps even the dogs; if they were lucky the smoke would confuse the hounds’ sense of smell.

 _If she could just get Caleb to safety_ …

She was still running as she was thinking this, trusting that he was following. There was a roaring in her head, as though of rushing water, as fear pounded through her. She wished she had drunk a little more before this, but there was no helping it now; no time to stop, no time to go back. She was running in the dark, with no way to go but forward.

And so, she almost did not notice the drop, until it was right before her feet. In fact, one of her feet did slip over the edge, sending a little shower of beech husks raining down over the steep, mossy bluff, to the river valley far below. Nott heard herself let out a cry, time turning momentarily slow and fluid as she scrambled for her balance on the edge of the cliff, staring down with dizzying vertigo. When she caught her balance though it was not much better, as she peered over the cliff, realising in that moment that the roaring that she had thought was only in her head was very, very real.

For far below, the mossy loam clinging to the incline dropped away as the wooded valley plunged down into a fearful gorge, all vast slabs of water-slicked bedrock, black and green in the gathering shadows. The sun had set now, and in that moment, Nott wished more than anything that she had weak human eyes like Caleb did, because there were very few sights she wanted to see less than the deep, wide pool into which the white rapids plunged below, its surface black and roiling in the darkness as she stood on the edge of the cliff.

And in that moment, Nott’s mind went blank, with paralysing, freezing fear, permeating every part of her body like the cold impact of water to the chest, making her gasp involuntarily, breathing becoming too fast. It pressed in on her from all sides as she stared down into that deep pool, so far below, with death behind her and absolutely nowhere else to run.

* * *

Caleb was running, sending blasts of flame wildly over his shoulder at their pursuers, when he came to the edge of the woods. He had seen Nott run in here, a swift shadow against the dark, but he couldn’t see her anymore. He gritted his teeth, trying to breath evenly as he ran; the tail-ends of the fear and paralysis he had felt not so long before - as he had stood with the smoke curling off a corpse of the man he had burned inside his armour - felt close at his heels still.

But no, he thought, he had to focus. Bright spots danced before his eyes, nightblind from the flame. He bit down on his tongue, tasting blood as he fired another bolt over his shoulder at their pursuers. The pain, as it always had, brought him a measure of clarity. He had always found that to be the case, back then, and it still worked now. _Pain reminds you_ _of what_ _is real_ , a voice said in the back of his mind even now, patient but insistent, dispassionate. _Pain allows you to understand what matters, and what does not_.

And so, Caleb ran forward into the darkness. Which was why he did not see Nott until he was right beside her, two glowing yellow eyes, impossibly wide, blinking out of the darkness as she whirled around to look back at him.

He had only the shortest instant to hear her exclamation of warning, before the ground was falling away beneath his feet, and he was falling, falling forwards and outwards with the momentum, but downwards all the same. Instinctively, Caleb threw out his hands, to grasp for his component pouch, for his chromatic diamond, for his spellbook, for anything that could help, but it was dark and he was falling, and his arm flailed wide.

Until, that was, a hand caught his hand. A hand that was small and had blunt claws, and was half-wrapped in bandages, grasping tightly as though there was nothing else in the world but his outstretched arm. He heard Nott scream his name in fear, and wholly expected, in that long moment of falling, to feel her fingers slip through his.

His fingers closed, instinctively, tight around Nott’s in his. But there was no stopping the fall, they were clinging together as they plummeted to the bottom of the chasm into what might as well have been the very darkness below the earth.

The fall felt both short and endless, a suspended moment of wind and darkness and roaring panic, as they crashed past the saplings clinging to the sheer cliff. Nott grasped at him as they fell, fingers closing like steel traps, bunched up in his coat and through his layers of clothes to his skin underneath, with more strength than he would have thought her capable of. Clamping his arms in place as she held on to him like a lifeline. The last thing he saw were her eyes, wide and open and glowing like golden lamps, before they hit the bottom.

Seeing nothing, at first the explosion of force at his back made Caleb think that he had simply hit solid rock, his body broken on it beyond repair. Not until a moment later, when he was falling downwards in an explosion of icy bubbles, did he realise it was water. But at that same moment, the shock of the cold hit him as he fell deep into the pool, making him gasp and suck in frigid water.

His heart beating with panic, Caleb was dimly aware of Nott in front of him, wreathed in bubbles and thrashing in the water like a mad thing. She kicked out, screaming in terror under the water. Caleb saw this in flashes, in the filtered, fading blue light from the sky above, spots still dancing across his vision from the flames; _how odd_ , he found himself thinking. _Fire can’t survive for long in the water_.

He didn’t let himself follow that train of thought though; he forced himself to hold his breath, to try to swim, even though his lungs were burning with needles of ice. He could do this; he could save himself, and Nott, so long as he just stayed calm. Before had been…an oversight, but now, he would make it up to her by saving her life. He just needed to remember the concentration training, the breathing exercises that helped to foster the ability to remain calm. He remembered water, falling in icy sheets on his face from a bucket, and the spell he had cast without even wavering as he had half drowned; hadn’t he faced this before? Hadn’t he been through worse, and survived?

Nott was kicking, blowing out streams of bubbles and thrashing about in the water. He tried to reach her, but all he succeeded in doing was allowing her elbow to strike his nose, sending a cloud of blood into the water, pain blooming in his face and making him gasp out a few bubbles, a little of his precious air. She was breathing in water, he realised, and kicking ineffectually; now that he thought about it, he had never asked Nott if she could swim, but it was becoming clearer each moment that she could not.

 _Remember your training_. But try as he might, those memories weren’t the ones that came. In that moment, as Caleb tried to claw his way in the direction he thought was upwards in the icy pool.

He remembered learning to swim himself, in the clear waters of the lake just outside Blumenthal when he was a young child. In the winter, the lake always froze over, but in the summer it was just about warm enough to swim in, bright green pond weed drifting around his ankles as he waded out until he had to stretch so the very tips of his toes would reach the bottom, sunlight dazzling him as it glimmered off the surface. His father had taught him to swim in that lake the summer he was six years old, and in later summers he had splashed and played with the other village children.

Until he hadn’t, anymore.

But even his own mind was betraying him, he thought, because that lake was nothing like this pool. This water was deep and icy, and had a slight downstream current that was nevertheless pulling Nott away from him by the moment, the bubbles from her panicked thrashing drifting away even as he reached for her, along with the blood from his nose.

And there was the cold, too; oppressive, numbing, making it harder and harder to move. His limbs felt stiff and heavy. _Useless_. Caleb gritted his teeth, trying to focus on the pain, rather than on the numbness. His clothes were weighing him down with water, but all he could do was try to swim, his body protesting the lack of air. His vision was beginning to tunnel, but he could still see Nott, a writhing silhouette against the streams of glimmering silver bubbles.

Caleb knew panic when he saw it. It looked different on her than it did on him, but then, in his quite significant experience, that was true for most people. But there was something in the way she moved, something that spoke of drowning not just in body, but in mind too, of falling into blackness from which there was no coming back, kicking and screaming the whole way to no avail. And even her struggling was growing weaker, as she breathed out the last air in her lungs.

 _You could leave_ , said a voice, quiet but clear. It was the only thing that came clearly to him in that moment, in fact. _Save yourself. Why do you need her anyway? What purpose does she serve really, that cannot be fulfilled by someone else?_

 _She is… replaceable_.

He gritted his teeth, summoning all his strength, spurred on by anger. _N_ _o._ _You are wrong_. It was the first time he had thought it in such a clear and concise way since meeting Nott in that cell more than a month ago, and it was both surprising and entirely unsurprising. Either way, it was enough to give him the strength he needed to swim, to push upwards to where Nott was and, heedless of her flailing fists, to wrap both arms around her small body and kick with his legs, bringing them both upwards, up towards the light.

After what seemed like an endless age, Caleb’s head broke the surface of the water, his lungs taking in a gasp of air that was half water at least, but it was enough. His heart was beating in his ears, his hair slicked across his face so he could barely see as he dragged Nott behind him, swimming to the side of the pool on the bank. It took almost more strength than he had to get her out of the water, and he almost blacked out while trying to pull himself up beside her, as the panic-fuelled strength he had had under the water began to drain away. But after a while he managed it, collapsing beside her in a wet heap, rolling over on his front and coughing out a stream of water.

He looked over to Nott, in sudden fear; surely, she had taken too much water into her lungs, and he didn’t know if he could -

But then, she was jolting up, violently retching up water in a gout, reaching out and clinging to his wet coat. Caleb realised after a few minutes of this that she was not coughing anymore but rather sobbing, though the way the convulsive motions shook her tiny frame was not that different.

He gave her a tentative pat on the back. “It is…okay now” he said. “W-we are alive, my friend.” He glanced up the cliff. He could see a few pinpricks of light at the top, but, he thought, no one in their right mind would follow them down here, and they probably should rightly be dead anyway. He couldn’t help the small, slightly hysterical laugh that slipped from him. “We are alive!”

“C…Ca…Caleb…” Nott was shaking so badly that she could barely get his name out, though whether with cold or something else he could not tell. His shoulders slumped; he still had more to do, he realised, as she trembled in his arms. She looked so pitifully small, especially sodden with water, and fragile, as though her bones were hollow like a bird’s. She let out a shuddering cry as he held her. “We…you… I’m sorry…”

He patted her on the head, feeling remorse once again. “ _I_ am sorry” he told her, fiercely to make her understand. “I…did not see the cliff…”

But Nott was shaking her head. “N-no…not….your f-fault…the water…I couldn’t…”

Caleb sighed, laying a finger under Nott’s chin, and gently lifting her head. Her eyes, once more, were wide with fear, blank and glazed with it, brimming with tears. He wiped some away with his thumb; not that it did much good, given how entirely soaked both of them were. He could taste a tang of iron at the back of his mouth, and feel the warm wash of blood from his nose running down his face. He wiped at it with his wet sleeve. He thought, for a moment, of telling her something, of telling her that there was no way in this world that she should ever be the one apologising to him. He thought of telling her everything, this small, terrified goblin girl he had nearly died for just now, for reasons that were still not entirely clear to him.

But somehow, the words wouldn’t come. So instead, he enfolded her in a very long, very wet hug. After a moment, her arms came up to hold him, fiercely tight as though she never wanted to let go.

It didn’t take long, though, for the night air to cool them both down and the rush to subside, and soon both of them were trembling with cold. Caleb could hardly feel his hands as he got up and summoned Frumpkin with a click of his fingers, to leave for Nott while he went to look for dry firewood. Somehow, he didn’t think she should be alone right now, here on the edge of the water.

Soon he had a small fire going, and was hanging up his and Nott’s outer clothes to dry on a nearly rock. Nott was sitting by the fire, looking into its depths and stroking Frumpkin’s fur almost mechanically; Caleb got the impression that she was trying to look anywhere but at the water’s edge, the black swirling eddies of the rocky pool into which they had fallen. Just a little downstream, Caleb now noticed in alarm, the water went over another steep fall, the gorge plunging away into white water.

It was late spring, so the night wasn’t too cold in this latitude; if it had been winter, Caleb thought as he prodded the fire with a stick, sending a glowing shower of sparks up towards the clouds scudding over the rising moon, he and Nott might be dead from hypothermia already. _Small mercies_. As it was, though, they were only shivering in their light underclothes as their outer clothes dried, Nott sitting so close to the fire that it was making Caleb a little nervous.

It wasn’t the only thing about her making him nervous; she had hardly spoken since he had pulled her from the water, sitting there with her skinny legs drawn up in front of her, arms wrapped around them as she stared into the fire, responding to him only in single words, if at all, her eyes seeing something that he didn’t.

 _Food_ , he thought. _That might do her good_. They didn’t have much food left to begin with, and nothing that had escaped being saturated the water, so dinner was a miserable affair at best. Usually, when they had to camp in the woods, Nott would wander off to hunt squirrels in the treetops and come back with blood and little scraps of fur around her mouth, and a smile on her face. But now, she merely sat staring at the fire, munching thoughtfully on the wet bread Caleb handed her.

Just as he was about to speak – something about _perhaps next we should try to find a spell that will help us when we are falling_ \- Nott looked up at him. “Caleb?” she asked. Her voice was quieter now, he thought, than he had ever heard it. “Are you…okay?”

He blinked, surprised by her words. “Of course.” He thumbed at the place where his nose had been bleeding, wondering if it had started up again. He rubbed his finger over the place on the ball of his thumb where Nott had bit him, a little row of bloody teeth marks cut in his flesh. “I was not hurt, I promise.”

“I’m glad…” said Nott. “But no, I mean…” she raised a bare arm, gestured weakly to the fire. “Back there…when you killed that man, you did it to save us. You know that, right?”

This had not been what he was expecting. Caleb closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them again. He nodded. “I know that, _ja_.”

“It was for…” Nott seemed to cast around for the right words. “For the greater good.”

The words struck at something old and buried. “Perhaps.”

“So…are you _okay_ with…” she was giving him a look that was a little more shrewd than he was comfortable with right now, despite the ghost of fear that still lingered in the hunch of her shoulders and the nervous clasping and unclasping of her fingers, “…everything?”

He forced his face to remain neutral. “…We are both free and alive, are we not?”

Her shoulders relaxed a little, fingers sinking deep into the fur on Frumpkin’s stomach. She scooted a little closer against his side, tentatively laying her head against him. It took him by surprise, how warm she was now. _She was smaller_ , he thought, _so she got cold faster, but also warmed up faster_ _._ _Something about surface area to volume ratio_. He put an arm around her, as gently as he could. “ _Ja_ , that is true” he said. And then, “Nott, are _you_ okay?”

She looked at him for a moment, then sighed. Letting Frumpkin down onto the ground, she scampered over to her small pile of possessions spread out to dry by the fire, her bare, clawed feet clacking on the damp rock, and rooted around inside her tattered leather bag. She pulled out her flask and took a long, long drink, before coming back to sit next to Caleb, and passing it to him. He accepted it gladly; the liquor was sharp and abrasive, but it brought a fiery glow to his chest and the back of his throat that was welcome, on a night like this. He passed the flask back to Nott, and she took another drink.

“Yes” she said after a while, breaking the silence. “Yes, I’m okay.”

“Hmm?”

“We’re on dry land. I’ll be okay”

 _That_ _was_ _not what I asked_ , he thought of saying, but didn’t. After all, there was so much in the same vein that she could say to him, that he could not or should not answer. Not that it was any of his business anyway, part of him said as usual. “Good” he said instead, with a nod. “Then we should get some sleep, I think.”

“We should” said Nott, as Caleb stood up and began to string the silver wire around their makeshift campsite by the rushing black waters, the drying clothes and the fire on the rocky bank that was bringing them back, slowly, their warmth. Nott’s words were a little slurred with drink now; from the sound the flask made when she raised it, she had nearly finished the whole thing. At least her hands were trembling a little less, he thought. She glanced nervously up the cliff from which they had fallen. “Will they come after us, do you think Caleb?”

He looked up too; above, he could see a sheer black wall, slick with spray from the waterfalls above and below, mirrored in the deep pool beside them. At the very top, he saw the outlines of dark trees, impossibly far into the sky. The lights that had been there had gone now. “I do not think they will come tonight” he said softly. He found his fingers brushing the amulet around his neck; its crystal was warming with with the returning heat of his body. “But perhaps we should keep a watch, just in case.” He watched as her shoulders slumped. “I will watch first” he said. He didn’t think he’d be getting much sleep now, anyway.

“Oh. But, Caleb, you - ”

“I will wake you if anything is wrong.”

She hesitated for a moment. Then, she nodded, finishing up the very last of her flask, tipping it upside down and shaking the last drops into her mouth. Then, quietly, she padded over to him, lying down curled up against his side. Privately, he asked Frumpkin to come and curl up on his lap, purring right beside Nott’s head. He laid a hand on her back as he watched the flames dance, resolving to keep the fire going all night.

Anyone else might have thought Nott fell asleep immediately, but Caleb could tell by now by her breathing and the twitch of her ears, that it took some time for her to drop off. But at last she did, slumping across his lap with Frumpkin as she drifted into a restless sleep, muttering and twitching as she dreamed.


End file.
